A newly discovered bundle of wartime love letters shows the saucy side of an
innocent era

In this age of instant communication, love letters seem a remnant of a more innocent past. Or so Loraine Fergusson thought until she found a bundle of 300 letters written between her father and mother during the Second World War. The sweethearts’ correspondence, tucked in a chest in her old family home in Hereford, had been forgotten since her mother’s death in 2009. Handwritten missals, drawings, faded photographs – they charted a tender, passionate relationship between army surgeon Brian Thomas and Katie Walker, a young nurse.

But when Fergusson started transcribing the letters to put them on her blog, she found that her parents’ heartfelt words weren’t quite as innocent as she’d expected. “I loved a bit of your letter when you said you were building some special undies,” wrote Thomas to Walker in April 1946. “I’ll handle you as gently as if you were a piece of Dresden china. I promise we won’t have a ripping time.” Walker’s reply was similarly steamy: “Darling one, it’s just as well you aren’t here as you would probably have to spank me hard – but what a heavenly spanking!”

Fergusson says deciphering her parents’ letters was “a bit like reading Fifty Shades of Grey”. The racy references seem out of keeping with the straitened times in which Thomas and Walker lived. But for couples separated during wartime, a few saucy sentences sent through the post could spice up a relationship in the bleakest of years.

“You couldn’t express yourself physically,” explains biographer Anne Sebba, who has studied the love letters between Wallis Simpson, the woman for whom Edward VIII abdicated the throne, and her ex-husband Ernest. “You might not see the other person again, so you had to express your love. Letters written at moments like this were so potent and raw – and arguably far racier than things people write today.”

Indeed, other couples writing at around the same time poured out their hearts on the page. The emotional strain of separation drove men and women from all walks of life to put pen to paper. While some composed sonnets to their beloveds, others used letters to express much baser desires.

Ernest Hemingway, writing to his wife Mary Welsh in 1945, revealed himself to be a frustrated lover. “Dearest Pickle,” he began. “It’s tough as hell without you and I miss you, so I could die. Much love, and know I’m not impatient – I’m just desperate.” Dylan Thomas wrote of his yearning from America for his wife Caitlin: “Have you forgotten me? I used to sleep in your arms – do you remember?”

But the saucy love letter was around long before the Forties. Some of the earliest lovers’ notes – dating back to Ancient Egypt – are erotic even by modern standards. “Bathe me in thy presence,” wrote one anonymous Egyptian woman to her suitor, “that I may let thee see my beauty in my tunic of finest royal linen when it is wet”.

In the 19th century, racy letters really came into their own. Gustave Flaubert was perhaps the most ardent letter-writer of his day. “I will cover you in love when next I see you, with caresses, with ecstasy,” he wrote to his mistress Louise Colet in 1846. “I want your bones to quiver with joy when you think of [me].” John Keats, too, understood the power of lust-fuelled letters. Writing to his lover, Fanny Brawne, in 1819, he declared: “You have ravished me away by a power I cannot resist.”

James Joyce composed some of the most gusset-ripping love letters ever made public. Writing to Nora Barnacle from Dublin in 1909, he declared: “I would love to be whipped by you, love! Write more and dirtier, darling.” The remainder of his correspondence with Nora, said to be his inspiration for writing Ulysses, is too steamy to be reprinted here.

Orlando Figes, professor of history at Birkbeck University and author of Just Send Me Word, an account of letters between a prisoner in a labour camp and his lover, says the rise of the saucy love letter reflects the restrained social and sexual mores of the era. “There was less expectation of physical gratification when lovers were together,” he adds, “so letters were physical treasures.”

As for Thomas and Walker, their racy wartime letters leave no doubt that they were, as Fergusson puts it, a couple “madly in love”. “It’s incredible how I become more starry-eyed and dreamy about you every day,” declared Walker in one letter. “It just must be love, darling one.”